Crucial P1 1000GB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD Review: Page 3 of 5

Unboxing & A Closer Look

The P1 NVMe M.2 solid state drive arrives in dark blue packaging with splashes of green and light blue throughout. On the front of the box at the top, you have the Crucial branding with a slogan of “The memory & storage experts”. In the bottom left-hand corner, the size of the drive is written with ours being the 1000GB model.

On the back of the box, it lists in several languages what is included with the M.2 drive. Also noted is a link to the where you can receive support and that there is a 5-year limited warranty on the P1 drive.

Opening the package reveals the M.2 SSD stored in a plastic blister pack.

Removing the entire contents of the box, Crucial has also included an installation guide for the drive.

Taking the drive out of the protective packaging, it’s nice to see that Crucial went with a black PCB. The black PCB will likely match your motherboard, especially if you don’t have a thermal cover for your M.2 slot. Across the majority of the drive is a white label that includes information such as drive size (which is 22mm wide and 80mm long), model number, serial and a note that the warranty is void if removed. On the left side of the board, we have 2 identical NW947 Micron flash modules (likely 500GB each).

Carefully peeling the label back, we reveal a Micron D9STQ DRAM module as well as a Silicon Motion SM2263EN PCIe NVMe SSD controller. The included DDR3L DRAM module has a clock rate of 800MHz with a capacity of 8GB. This will act as a write cache which will help achieve consistent 1700MB/s write speeds with minimal slowdowns. The SM2263EN controller uses a PCIe Gen3 x4 interface with NVMe Express 1.3 and has a total of 4 NAND channels. It is capable of achieving sequential reads of 2400 MB/s, sequential writes of 1700 MB/s, random reads of 300K IOPS (input/output operations per second) and random writes of 250K IOPS. Based on the P1 datasheet of 2000 MB/s reads, 1700 MB/s writes, 240K random read IOPS and 170K random write IOPS it utilizes the majority of the SM2263EN controller capabilities.

The back of the M.2 drive is chip-less with only the solder points visible. Taking a closer look at the right contact points we can see it has “M key” connector meaning it can use up to 4 PCIe lanes.